IMPLEMENTING THE GRADUATION MINDSET
19 Support Alternative Solutions
20 Prepare for College and Careers
About the Author
Eric Jensen, PhD, is a former teacher from San Diego, California. Since the early 1990s, he has synthesized brain research and developed practical applications for educators. Jensen is a member of the invitation-only Society for Neuroscience and the President’s Club at Salk Institute of Biological Studies. He cofounded SuperCamp, the first and largest brain-compatible academic enrichment program, previously held in fourteen countries with over sixty-five thousand graduates. He is listed as a Top 30 Global Guru in Education and does professional development internationally.
Jensen has authored over thirty books, including Teaching With Poverty in Mind, Tools for Engagement, Engaging Students With Poverty in Mind, Turnaround Tools for the Teenage Brain, Bringing the Common Core to Life in K–8 Classrooms, Teaching with the Brain in Mind, Different Brains, Different Learners, and Poor Students, Rich Teaching, Revised Edition.
To learn more about Eric Jensen’s teacher workshops and leadership events, visit Jensen Learning (www.jensenlearning.com).
Introduction
The core title for this book and its companion, Poor Students, Rich Teaching, Revised Edition, suggests they are about succeeding with students from poverty. But really, it’s about something much more than that: rich teaching. Here, the word rich means full, bountiful, and better than ever. Teachers can make a difference in students’ lives with richer teaching. They just need the knowledge and tools to do it. It’s also about developing the high-impact mindsets necessary to accomplish this.
In Poor Students, Rich Teaching, Revised Edition, I establish the knowledge component of this equation—the research and strategies that high-performing teachers can use to defeat toxic narratives and help students succeed through richer and more abundant teaching. This handbook takes a tool-focused approach to these strategies. With a lesser focus on the supporting research, this book instead provides a plethora of tools you can use to help bring these strategies to life. There are graphic organizers for your students, brainstorming and worksheets for you to plan lessons, checklists to ensure you’re hitting all of a strategy’s key points, surveys to self-assess your current thinking and practices, and reflection questions to help you consider how you can change your practices (your teaching mindsets) to enrich your teaching.
To kick things off, we’ll take a quick tour of how I’ve organized this book, how it works as a critical part of your teaching toolkit and how you can get the most of it. Then we’ll take a quick look at why these mindsets have such a high impact on bringing out the best in your students from poverty.
About This Book
This book’s major theme is developing the most powerful tool for change: mindset. A mindset is a way of thinking about something. As Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck (2008) explains, people (broadly) think about intelligence in two ways: (1) either you have it or you don’t (the fixed mindset), or (2) you can grow and change (the growth mindset). Those with a fixed mindset believe intelligence and competency are a rigid unchangeable quality. Those with a growth mindset believe that intelligence and competency can develop over time as the brain changes and grows.
This book broadens and deepens the mindset theme to many new areas of student and teacher behaviors that you’ll find highly relevant. It continues in seven parts, each highlighting a specific mindset with chapters that offer easy-to-implement and highly effective strategies and tools you can use immediately. Every part begins with a series of self-assessment questions to get you in touch with your current approach and thinking related to the mindset. Similarly, every chapter begins with a simple survey related to that topic. These are about understanding where you are starting from so that you’re ready to embrace the new thinking that comes from changing your mindset. As you dive in, you’ll find the strategies and tools you need to make these changes. Here are the seven parts.
• Part one: The relational mindset—Chapters 1 through 3 explore the relational mindset and begin to discover why the types of relationships teachers have (or don’t have) with students are one of the biggest reasons why students graduate or drop out. Everything you do starts with building relationships with your students.
• Part two: The achievement mindset—Chapters 4 through 6 teach you about powerful success builders with the achievement mindset. Students from poverty can and do love to learn, when you give them the right tools.
• Part three: The positivity mindset—Chapters 7 through 9 home in on your students’ emotions and attitudes. Each chapter focuses on building an attitude of academic hope and optimism in both your students and yourself. If you’ve ever put a mental limitation on any student (don’t worry, we all have), these chapters are must-reads. Your new, rock-solid positivity mindset will help your students soar.
• Part four: The rich classroom climate mindset—Chapters 10 through 12 offer strategies to take all that positivity you’ve generated and use it to create an energetic, high-performing class culture, using the rich classroom climate mindset. You’ll learn the secrets that high-performing teachers use to build an amazing classroom climate.
• Part five: The enrichment mindset—Chapters 13 through 15 focus on building breakthrough cognitive capacity in students. A big problem for students from poverty is their mental bandwidth, often known as cognitive load. Here, you’ll see the clear, scientific evidence that shows, without a molecule of doubt, that you can ensure your students build cognitive capacity in the form of memory, thinking skills, vocabulary, and study skills.
• Part six: The engagement mindset—Chapters 16 through 18 dig into student involvement in a new way with the engagement mindset. You’ll gain quick, easy, and practical strategies for maintenance and stress, for buy-in, and to build community.
• Part seven: The graduation mindset—Chapters 19 and 20 help you focus on the gold medal in teaching: students who graduate job or college ready. Each chapter centers on school factors absolutely proven to support graduation. You’ll learn the science of why these